Technology

On this final day of OSCON, the only thing I well and truly wanted to see -- and had all week -- was Brian Aker's "How To Hack Your Home Phone System" presentation.

I'd certainly heard rumors about Aker's experimentation with Asterisk at home.. how if you dial "#666" you will transfer the current caller to the sound of screaming monkeys (and put their telephone number in a telemarketer blacklist so they can never ring through again)... how if you aren't on a pre-set list of phone numbers, there's absolutely no way you can make his phone ring from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m.

With the 2.0 bios update released tomorrow (including the non-hacked web browser), Sony is launching 'PSP Portable TV', a multimedia download channel.

PSP Portable TV will boast 100 free downloadable movie trailers, independent films and TV pilots. In the future, Sony is planning to introduce premium content downloads (for a fee) such as sports programmes, music videos, television shows and even whole films.

Japan has plans to start building a supercomputer next year that can operate 73 times faster than the world's fastest supercomputer, the government said Monday.

The American Blue Gene/L system supercomputer developed by International Business Machine Corp. at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California, currently holds the title of the world's fastest. That machine is capable of 136.8 teraflops, or 136.8 trillion calculations per second, according to Japan's Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology.

One impact having seven young children in my house has had, aside from the grocery bill, is the number of CDs and DVDs piled up around every player and PC in the house.

Kids are notorious for not putting anything away. I remember growing up, my dad would tell me to take better care of my records and 45s (see how old I am?). I had to buy dozens of "DiscWashers" in my life to assure my vinyl sounded great on my turntable.

Of course, if you scratch the bottom of a DVD or CD, you're toast unless you can buff out the offending scratch.

Scientists are questioning the safety of a Star Wars-style riot control ray gun due to be deployed in Iraq next year.

The Active Denial System weapon, classified as "less lethal" by the Pentagon, fires a 95-gigahertz microwave beam at rioters to cause heating and intolerable pain in less than five seconds.

The idea is people caught in the beam will rapidly try to move out of it and therefore break up the crowd.

In honour of the first manned Moon Landing back in July 20, 1969, Google have launched an out of this world version of their Google Maps service - Google Moon.

The clever boffins at Google have created a scrollable, zoomable map of the Moon's surface, adding NASA imagery to the interface.

'Women love flowers daily'. Now, what in the world is that supposed to mean? Well, that's actually a unique picture based information access control, called PicturePIN, for mobile devices such as PocketPCs and PDAs. A patent-pending authentication software from Pointsec, a mobile security solutions provider, PicturePIN consists of a series of pictures that can be randomly manipulated in place of the conventional password.

This particular case is hypothetical, but the situation is real, experts told UPI's Networking.It is something increasingly plaguing corporate networks. To combat the problem, experts said, companies are going to have to monitor workflow, set new policies and install IT to intercept illicit content. The problem is, many companies skip the first step, which involves evaluating work practices and noting how and where secure knowledge is transferred, before investing in IT, said David Drab, director of information content security services at Xerox Global Services.

Fans of the TiVo digital video recorder have discovered how to break it open and install a larger hard drive. Early users of the Roomba, a robot vacuum cleaner, are rewiring it to serve as a "mobile security robot." Owners of the new Sony PlayStation Portable have figured out how to use the game machine to surf the Internet and exchange instant messages.

Deep inside the cave-like laboratories of the legendary research center that created the atomic bomb, scientists have begun work on a Manhattan Project of a different sort.